NIL is repeating influencer marketing's first decade
NIL is repeating influencer marketing's first decade
From 2014 to 2019, brands burned hundreds of millions of dollars on influencer deals built on inflated follower counts and bot engagement. The market didn't settle down until third-party verification tools (HypeAuditor, Tagger, CreatorIQ) and more rigorous ROI frameworks were built. Even now, about one-third of marketers say measuring content creator performance is the biggest challenge to their influencer programs.
NIL is on the same path.
Why it matters
Brand marketers, Athletic Administrators, and Professional Service Providers are making decisions every day — many of them without NIL data that would inform their thinking. The sources that show up in the news cycle aren't the ones that show you most of the market — and the gap between what gets reported and what's actually happening is wider than most people working in NIL realize.
The sources of NIL data — what each shows, what each leaves out:
Marketplace platforms (like Opendorse). Shows: deal types, sport-by-sport averages, and trend lines from athletes on the platform. Misses: every deal that happens off-platform — and there are plenty of them.
CSC / NIL Go. Third-party deals over $600 cleared by the College Sports Commission. Shows: what got submitted and approved, plus rejection reasons. Misses: deals that never made it to the portal. That's a lot of them — the gap between cleared volume and the estimated market is large enough that the CSC's own leadership has flagged it publicly.
NIL Forum Research Poll. My monthly survey of 5,000+ college athletes plus 1,000 high school prospects. Shows: The "why" behind athletes' decisions. Misses: deal-level detail like contract terms and payment timing; self-reported earnings carry recall bias. It's the only source built to ask athletes what they did rather than infer it.
On3 NIL Valuations. A projection, not a ledger. Shows: a relative ranking built from roster value, performance, influence, and exposure. Misses: what athletes actually earned — the algorithm does not act as a tracker of the value of NIL deals athletes have completed to date. That distinction gets lost almost every time a valuation gets cited by media (other than On3) as income.
Public records (FOIA, Form 990s). Shows: aggregate institutional spending and collective tax filings. Misses: almost everything else — at least six states counsel against disclosure and transparency, and FOIA requests get blocked routinely under FERPA.
News reporting and leaks. On3, Sportico, ESPN, Front Office Sports. Shows: the biggest deals, often with compensation info. Misses: the median NIL deals (by definition, where most of the action is). Headlines distort expectations on every campus.
Between the lines
Nonrevenue sports — where a lot of the genuine brand work is happening — barely show up in any of these. The athletes earning $0 to $5,000, who are most of college sports, are nearly invisible. When the only data getting circulated is about the top 1%, the other 99% gets priced, advised, and managed on assumptions instead of evidence.
The big picture
The influencer space took about five years and a wave of new tools before brands could price a deal with any confidence. NIL is at the same point, with bigger checks moving faster and a smaller margin for error. The schools, brands, and advisors that build a habit of triangulating across sources now will be ahead of the ones still waiting for a single authoritative number.
The bottom line
If you're making NIL decisions right now, you're working with partial views of the market. Knowing which one to use — and which one is going to mislead you — is a big part of the job.
About the NIL Forum and Bill Carter
The NIL Forum is the premier professional community in NIL, providing monthly live speakers, proprietary data, and networking. NIL Forum Founder Bill Carter has advised brands on Name, Image, Likeness for 25 years—first in pro sports, now at the college level. He was the Co-Founder of the Gen Z sports agency Fuse, which he sold in 2019. In 2020, he founded Student-Athlete Insights and consults on NIL strategy with Fortune 500 companies and 30+ DI universities.